Now that report cards have been sent, we hope that the following tips will be helpful in supporting your child at home. Please call the Oak Bluffs School for any additional support. Thank you and have a safe and happy break.Parent Tips for Kindergarten Support: Reading –

Support your child as a reader by making it fun for your child

Go on a letter hunt

Sing and recite Nursery Rhymes and the Alphabet

Explore books and retell the stories.

Be sure he/she has books to look at and encourage reading at home.

Read to your child encouraging him/her to look at the pictures and find things.

Discuss classroom topics of focus sent home in letters from teachers; oral language and conversations help deepen students' understandings of topics.

Discuss what you are reading with your child. Find stories with enough complexity to engage their curiosity and inspire thought. Read them a variety of books and talk about the differences. Read fiction and non-fiction, fairy tales and folk tales, letters, magazines, picture captions, read everything and anything!

Discuss the features of non-fiction (table of contents, glossary, index, etc.) Discuss the elements of fiction (characters, setting, problem/solution, etc.)

Ask your child what they think about what you read. Encourage and model for them how to explain why they think or feel what they do.

Talk about and explain new vocabulary and concepts.

Most importantly, make it fun! Or even better, make reading the best part of your child’s day by sharing the joy of reading with them!

Encourage and celebrate all your child’s attempts to write. Write notes to them. Ask friends and family to write letters to your child and help them respond. Let your child help you write lists and schedules. Write stories together. Let your child dictate stories to you, illustrate them and then read it to someone! Buy or make your child a diary or journal.

Help your child hear the sounds in the words they are attempting to write. Let them invent spelling. Tell them how to spell words they ask for.

Practice sight words that come home. Read them, spell them, put them in sentences, play games with them.

Spend up to 10-15 minutes a day on LEXIA

In Math:

Find fun simple games to practice the skills of counting by 1s, 2s, 5s, and 10s up to 100. (i.e. take turns counting in the car, you say 2, they say 4, you say 6, etc.)

Play games teaching the concept of counting on from where they landed last.

Practice addition and subtraction facts with sums less then 20 by playing card games or quizzing each other for fun, call it the Math Game. Let children use their fingers, or other manipulatives if needed, to solidify one-to-one correspondence. Addition Top-it: both players turn over two cards and add or subtract them, whoever has the highest or lowest number takes all the cards.

Involve your children in discussions about money on an everyday basis. Talk about how you use it in everyday life. Give your children opportunities to identify coins and their values. Let them earn, save, count, and spend their own money.

Help your child learn to read an analog clock instead of telling them the time. Teach them to identify the minute hand and the hour hand. Focus on teaching them to read the hour hand first, then the minute hand by the half hour, quarter hour, and five minute intervals.

Find and talk about number stories in everyday life, explain your thinking as you help your child solve the problems (i.e., Look Johnny has 4 books and you have 2. How many books do you have altogether?) Ask: What is the number sentence that matches that story? (i.e., 4 + 2 =6) Other questions: “How can you be sure your answer is correct? What tools can help you solve this problem? Have you solved a similar problem before? What problem are you asked to solve?

Play trading up games to help children begin to grasp place value on a concrete level. The Money Exchange Game: players roll dice and collect pennies equal to the number on the dice. They trade up for nickels and dimes until they have one dollar. Another great card game for teaching place value is Name That Number. Each player turns over two cards and tries to make the biggest number. (i.e. 25 or 52). Whoever makes the biggest number takes all the cards.

Play and play again the math games sent home at the beginning of each topic of study.

The Oak Bluffs School Spelling Bee took place Tuesday, February 18th. A group of 11 fine spellers from grades 4-8 competed in this annual event. The spellers included Skylar Hall, Brianna Oliveira, Reyna Faust, Alex Rego, Zack Smith, Makenzie Luce, Andrew Marchand, Ashley Casey, Lila Mikos, Nicole Arruda and Avery Villegas. After 8 rounds, just 5 spellers remained and by round 13 only two spellers were left standing, 5th grader Zack Smith and 7th grader Makenzie Luce. These two would battle it out for the next 10 rounds. In round 22, Zack Smith was tripped up by "panache." This sent Makenzie into a round of her own where she she spelled "abstruse" correctly and was crowned the OB School Spelling Champion of 2014! We congratulate Makenzie and wish her well in the Island-wide Spelling Bee on March 14th at the MVRHS Performing Arts Center at 9:30 am. Proud to be from OB!

Will Arnett (the voice of Bat Man in the LEGO Movie) reads random New England winter weather school closings while in-character. Can you guess which Island school is featured in this clip from Jimmy Kimmel Live?

Grades K-4 Semester report cards were sent home on Monday, February 17, 2014. Please keep in mind that our K-4 Report Card Rubric is not an ABCDF grade, rather an indicator of your child’s performance against each standard. If there is a blank next to a standard, the standard has yet to be introduced so therefore we have not supplied a rating.

K-4 Report Card Rubric Kindergarten Scale: 3 – Your child is consistently demonstrating the standard. 2 – Your child is progressing toward consistently demonstrating the standard. 1 – Your child is beginning to demonstrate the standard.Grades 1-4 Scale: 3 – MasteryConsistently Demonstrates Understanding of Standard Applies Standard Independently 2 – ProgressingDeveloping Understanding of StandardWorking Toward Independence1 – Beginning Beginning to Understand Standard with support Ratings of 2 and 3 indicate acceptable progress within the standard. A “3” rating indicates that the student is demonstrating acceptable progress in a standard and is transferring skills independently. A “2” rating indicates that the student continues to develop skills in that standard. A “1” rating indicates that the student is experiencing challenges and the child may be receiving direct instruction and or small group support. As with everything, we ask that you please let us know of your questions and concerns. Our staff is here to help and would like to ensure that there is clear communication around the progress of all of our students.

The second grade annual Food Pantry Drive will take place all next week from Monday February 10th through Friday February 14th. Students from our second grade will collect donations from each classroom every day.

Food drives like ours help families in need all over the nation and the world, but our local friends and neighbors on the Vineyard count on your help right here at home. It's our valentine to the community.

This year will mark the 25th year of food collecting at the Oak Bluffs School. The folks at the Island Food Pantry really count on our school's annual drive, so please be generous! As always, we appreciate your unwaivering support of this very important annual project.

I would like to inform you of an opportunity that will allow for better communication and explanation of our Kindergarten through 4th grade report card. I invite the parents of our Kindergarten through 4th grade students to a report card night this Tuesday, February 11, 2014 at 6:30PM in our school library. My hope is that this explanation of the report card will be a mechanism to display each grade level rubric and create a method by which parents will be able to look at the standards and be offered strategies to support our children at home. Representative teachers from each grade level will be present to help facilitate this very important meeting. For those of you that are unable to attend, we will send home a rubric with this same information so that you may benefit as well. Thank you and please let me know of your questions and concerns.

We use Power Announcement to inform our community of delayed openings, early dismissals, and closings due to inclement weather. The announcements come in the form of texts, emails, and phone calls. This has been successful for the most part. Our system experienced problems in the phone portion during the most recent, delayed opening. Our apologies for the inconvenience this caused. We ask that you please refer to our website, television, and radio announcements during any future storms in the event that we have not rectified the problem. Thank you for your patience and understanding.